


The Madness of Love

by Raegaryen



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Moral Ambiguity, Multi, Multiple Pairings, POV Multiple, Politics, Pre - Robert's Rebellion, R Plus L Equals J, Robert's Rebellion, Tragedy at Summerhall, well mostly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 13:05:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16119074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raegaryen/pseuds/Raegaryen
Summary: "When a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin..."From his birth to his death, Rhaegar Targaryen never really knew which side of the coin he landed on.--A mostly canon compliant retelling of Robert's Rebellion and everything that led to it.





	The Madness of Love

**Author's Note:**

> So this is the first time I'm posting anything I've written online...so bear with me.
> 
> I've always been fascinated with the tales of Robert's Rebellion, so this story is a sort of behind-the-scenes look at Westeros during Aerys' rule. We don't get a lot of details about this timeframe, and what we do get is purposefully murky-we hear all these biased memories of people from either side of the war and almost all of them contradict each other or are simply speculation from survivors. It's the epitome of an unreliable narrative.
> 
> Granted, this is just MY interpretation of possible circumstances that could have led to the events that we do know about. I take a lot of liberty with the characters and the choices they make, while still trying to stick to canon. Hence the mostly canon compliant tag. I'm just trying to justify the actions of these characters in a way that makes sense to me.
> 
> That being said, alllllll the characters are gonna be hella morally ambigous. I have very firmly set up camp in the grey area of Westeros and I'm Not Leaving. Let's be real here: Rhaegar, Lyanna, and Robert cooked up a huge rebellion that literally flipped the country on its head. That is not the actions of rational people who think things through so I'm going to write them as the selfish little f-ed up shitheads they are. Be prepared to not like them.
> 
> Alright, I'll shut up now. Please leave a comment and tell m what you think!!
> 
> \--Rae

"Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to the path which nature has marked out for him.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

\---

The world was on fire. Flames of green surrounded her, scorching her clothing as panic consumed her. Her hand stung from the cut that slashed through her palm. _Grandfather, what have you done? We’ll all die for your dreams._

Her grandfather-her kind, sweet grandfather who’d always given her sweets as a child and tried to convince her father to let her marry for love-must have lost his mind. It was the only explanation she could think of. Aegon the Unlikely, they called him. Would it soon be Aegon the Mad?

Rhaella couldn’t see through the mirage of smoke and wildfire. Wood cracked under the heat, creating a sickening symphony with someone’s brutal screams. She couldn’t recognize whose face it belonged to. Death rendered all voices the same.

She could feel herself running, but no conscious thought accompanied the movement. Where was she now? How far from the hall had she gone? Every beat of her heart echoed loudly in her ears, every pulse rushing right beneath her skin with wild despair. She had to find her way out. She couldn’t die in this damned castle. She couldn’t let her baby die with her. Her baby must live.

Someone was yelling. Was that her name? It couldn’t be. But there it was, a shout of her name and…something about running?

A quick hit to her side, and then she was falling, sliding across the floor. One hand reached desperately to cup the bottom of her belly, instinctively. Her body twisted, so she’d land on her back. Gods, was her baby hurt? Could a fall to her back hurt the babe as much as a fall to her stomach? She should’ve listened to that nagging midwife more.

The impact sent pain ricocheting up her spine, head hitting the stone floor first, then shoulders and the rest of her body quickly afterwards. Rhaella could feel blood welling on the back of her head, trailing down the slope of her neck. She pushed up to her elbows, a feeling like an ocean crashing back and forth making her head hard to lift. There, right where she had just been standing, a man was trapped under a fallen beam that burned with that awful, brilliant green. Part of the wood had splintered, spearing straight through the man’s chest where blood had to begun to bubble like boiling water. The man’s arms flopped and spasmed weakly, but one hand rose to point towards her.

“Princess,” the voice was raspy, broken and joined with the sound of gurgling deep in his body. She’d heard that gurgle before, when her childhood nursemaid had been dying of the winter sickness. Fluid in the lungs, the maester had said. “Princess, go. Run, sweet girl.”

Only one man called her that.

“Ser Duncan?” Gods, her voice had been ravaged by the smoke. “Is that you?” She couldn’t tell. The side of his face that she could see was grotesque. The skin of his forehead looked half-liquid, bubbled in places and sliding down to his where his eye should be. But there was no eye. In the socket sat a gelatinous sludge that slid slowly with his every movement, hooded by a folded mass of blackened skin that had melted into one gross bulge. The skin of his cheek had seemed to have been peeled off, crisped slices hanging over a twisted ear and showing the bones of his jaw. His lips were nothing, just peeled back flesh over broken teeth.

He was trying to say something, and the hand he’d stretched out to her was shaking and looked broken. Something glinted between his fingers. No words left his mangled mouth, just more of that awful gurgle and stuttering gasps. Rhaella crawled toward him, reaching out with her own hand, blindly searching for a way to comfort the man who’d protected her family for her entire life. She took his hand in hers, ignoring the feebleness that had never been there before. She felt something hot drop into her slashed palm, and then he was pushing her fist insistently to her stomach.

She could barely make out the knight’s last words. “Aegon...dead. Egg...is...gone.” A cough began to rattle him, and the young princess couldn’t hold back a shriek when blood from his mouth sprayed across her chest and throat. She scrambled to her feet, the reality of Ser Duncan’s death hitting her like a war hammer. He’sdeadhe’sdeadhe’sdead!

Opening her clenched fist, Rhaella studied the large golden disc through an addled haze. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she recognized it. It was the pendant grandfather liked to wear, the one emblazoned with the image of a dragon in flight. The metal was warped now, the once beautiful picture it made was smudged and wrangled until it was almost indecipherable. The gold was horribly hot in her hand, stinging in the wound, but she wouldn’t let it go, even as she began to sob. Grandfather had been wearing it, right before.

-

  
_Laughter filled the room. Rhaella giggled as her littlest relative, Baela, danced. Well, in all honestly, the little seven-year-old girl wasn’t so much as dancing as jumping from foot to foot and flinging her arms out, but it was cute all the same. She watched from her place by the wall as Grandfather Aegon and his sister Daella laughed over how they were once betrothed, before he’d run off with Grandmother Betha. Great Aunt Rhae’s face was the color of a beet as her siblings teased her about some story about a love potion when they were young. Rhaella didn’t have the faintest idea as to what they were speaking of, but found herself laughing along with them all the same._

_King Aegon was fiddling with the gold pendant that hung heavily on his chest. The roaring dragon had been painstakingly etched into the metal, wings lifted in flight. One tiny, sparkling ruby glowed as the dragon’s eye. Rhaella had always loved it, and when she was small she used to play with it for ages while her grandfather told her story after story about the first Aegon, the great conqueror. He never let her forget that Aegon would have never succeeded without his sisters._

  
-

She couldn’t stop the tears that poured from her eyes, even as she felt the water sizzling against her skin. Rhaella’s fingers felt as if they were on fire, so tightly wound around the melting gold. She knew that she should drop it, try to keep her skin from any more damage, but she couldn’t escape her grief long enough to do so. The image of Baela spinning around, smiling and laughing and singing, before the pyromancers came into the hall and everything erupted, kept flashing before her eyes.

Rhaella stood there, frozen with flames eating away at everything around her. She would probably have died in that spot, lost in a torturous cycle of sorrow, if not for a sudden wave of cramping at the bottom of her stomach. Gasping at the tight pain, the realization of what it meant struck her.

The baby was coming, now. She knew from the midwives that she’d have some time from the start of the pains to the actual birth, but they told her the pain would start gentler. Like the cramps of her moonblood. Had her body been fading out the pains while her panic had held her in its grips? She’d heard from soldiers who said that sometimes, when the body and mind were stressed, pain would be unnoticeable unless it was truly awful.

Instinct took over her, that age-old protective instinct of a mother moving her. Rhaella’s eyes surveyed the burning walls, trying to identify anything that would tell her where she was. Recognizing a statue in the corner, partially hidden under a burning tapestry, she realized how close she was to the front of the castle.

She took off running, heart breaking as she turned her back on the ruined body of Ser Duncan. Pain from all over her body wracked her bones with every step, yet she refused to stop. The path she took was from memory alone-all tapestries or paintings Rhaella would have used to discern where she was had long since been burned to ash. She tried not to stop, but every few minutes, that awful, gripping pain in her womb would halt her steps and force her to gasp and cling to her belly.

Rhaella had no idea how long it had been when she reached the entrance, her only sense of time being the intervals between the pains. Her heart rose at the sight of the grand doors. The wildfire hadn’t quite reached this far, and the young princess was glad to find the air slightly clearer. Slowing, she stumbled to the door on sore muscles, the waning adrenaline causes her limbs to begin to shake almost violently. Her hands pressed against the door insistently, blood chilling when she realized that it wasn’t going to budge. Leaning her shoulder against the part where the two doors met, she shoved with all the weight of her body. Still, the doors did not move.

The crackle of the wildfire was getting louder, and she knew that meant it was progressing its way through the castle. Rhaella couldn’t just sit here and wait for it to consume her. There had to be another way out of the damned, ruinous castle. She and her babe wouldn’t die here. She refused to die here. She was a Targaryen, damnit, and she was not going to die in a madman’s flames.

Taking in a deep breath, she threw her head back and screamed her anger. It was at the tail end of her cry when she heard a croaking voice yell back to her.

“Princess! Princess, is that you?”

Rhaella spun from one direction to the other, looking for the voice’s source. Seeing nothing, a hysterical laugh began to bubble in her throat. Gods, this is it. I’m dying and I’m losing my sanity. Nevertheless, she tried to yell back. “Hello? I can hear you, but I can’t see you. Please, get me out of here, my babe is coming and I can’t let us die here.”

“Seven hells! I-yes Princess, I’ll get you out. I’m right outside the doors. I’ll find a way back in, I swear it!”

“Wait!” Her nails clawed at the doors, “Who are you?” No answer came, so Rhaella sunk to the floor. The smoke must have broken her mind, or perhaps when she fell earlier, but now she was hallucinating voices and there was no way out of this burning hellhole.

Something shattered in the distance, like glass breaking against stone. Moments after, the sound of running footsteps. Rhaella refused to lift her head from where it leaned against her knees, fearing her mind was playing some cruel trick on her.

That is, until a hand laid itself atop her shoulder. Looking up, she near began to cry in relief. “Maester Gyldayn?”

“Yes, your highness, I told you I’d find a way in, didn’t I? Now, up we go. We must get you out of here before the babe is born.” The young maester wrapped one arm around her lower back and heaved her up, letting her clutch his free hand with her own.

He led her down down corridor at her right, hustling in a way that was almost a run, but not quite. Rhaella could the see sweat collecting over his bushy eyebrows, watching as a drop fell every few seconds into his eyes, watching as it made him blink owlishly.

Coming upon an open door, the maester gently pushed her through. She wasn’t entirely sure what the room was for, as she had never set foot in it before, but there was a collection of lavish armchairs pushed in one corner with random little tables decorated with vases and baubles and all sorts of little trinkets. Rhaella gripped her stomach as another pain rolled through her, the maester thankfully stopping and helping her breath through it. She focused her eyes on the long desk that sat below a high and narrow window. At the foot of the desk laid a broken glass something, although she couldn’t quite tell what it had been.

Noticing her eyes on the glass, the maester sighed. “I, uh, knocked it off when I was climbing through. I didn’t realize it was there.”

So that must have been what made the shattering sound, not her mind playing tricks on her. The affirmation soothed her agitation and panic a bit. Maester Gyldayn gently helped her up onto the desk, carefully pushing her one way to keep her balance. Anxiously, she peered out the window. The ground wasn’t too far down, but it was stone, and if she fell the wrong way, she worried for her child.

Gyldayn noticed her apprehension quickly. “Would you like me to go first, your highness? So I could help you through?”

“Yes. Yes, I think that might be better.” Rhaella twisted her hands from his grip, allowing the maester to push his thin frame through the tapered opening. In a moment, Gyldayn’s body dropped, leaving only his hands clutching the edge before they, too, disappeared. Rhaella, one hand pressed to the swell of her belly and the other firm against the wall, edged closer until her toes dangled over the mouth of the window.

Forcing herself to breathe steadily, the princess tried to judge the distance between her and the ground. Taller than Bonifer, perhaps, though not quite as tall as Ser Duncan. It was certainly of a greater height than her own.

“Perhaps I should sit?” Her voice warbled like a damned bird, “Then push off from there?”

“Yes, I was thinking quite the same, Princess. I’ll catch you from there.” Gyldayn’s reed-thin arms stretched towards her, thick maester’s sleeves falling away to his upper arms. Oh good, Rhaella thought bitterly, a man easily thrice my senior and half my weight, who has perhaps never lifted anything other than a book, is going to catch me. Damn you, grandfather. Damn you, for damning us all.

Lowering herself was a feat in itself. The skewed balance of her belly nearly toppled her twice, but she kept one hand clinging to the outer side of the window, shimmying it down in time with her body until her bottom was firmly on the ridge. Her legs swung where she couldn’t see them, trying to ready herself. Gyldayn’s hands wrapped themselves around her ankles, moving her so her feet were parallel to the ground and wouldn’t twist when she landed.

“Just...slide yourself off, your highness. I’ve got you.” He promised. Right as Rhaella began to fully push her body off, that same clenching pain from before gripped her body, making her gasp as her joints locked. Maester Gyldayn tried his best, in his surprise, to catch her, but her weight proved to be too much for the frail man and they both tumbled to the ground.

The princess nearly screamed when she felt a pull all the way up her leg, ankle rolling violently against the ground. In the haze of pain, a stray thought thanked the gods that she’d only fallen to her knees and not her head or stomach.

The maester wasn’t hurt overmuch, having been pushed back by Rhaella’s fall so that he only landed on his bottom, palms lightly skinned from where he’d broke his fall. The man’s gait was shaky as he stood, holding out both bloodied hands to help her up. She tried to push herself to her feet, she truly, truly tried, but her ankle wouldn’t take the pressure and she only ended up collapsing once more.

Gyldayn was mumbling something, or maybe he was speaking normally and she just couldn’t hear him. The rush of energy she’d felt, the one that kept her sprinting madly through burning halls just moments earlier, was suddenly gone, leaving her oddly cold with a bone deep exhaustion. A birthing pain ripped through her once again, but where it had been hard to weather before, it was unbearable now. She wanted to scream against it, to cry and screech and do something to vocalize the pure torture of it, but the only sound to leave her throat was a raspy, broken moan. She couldn’t find the energy to move at all, and she only partly noticed that she was shaking.

Rhaella felt both numb and oversensitive when the maester hooked both his arms under her own. He pulled her away from the castle, and with each step he stumbled like a drunkard. She managed to keep her eyes open, but her head lolled to the side painfully, heavy and uncooperative at her every attempt to raise it.

As they got closer to the edge of the woods, on the far side of the castle’s meadow, Rhaella watched as the greedy green flames swallowed the domed turrets of her family’s home. Dragonstone may be the ancestral seat of House Targaryen, but Summerhall had been their home. There, they didn’t need to be stately and austere and regal, but only themselves, held in the loving embrace of family where they needn’t hide. She’d spent nearly half her life here, running through the meadow with her cousins and braiding flowers into her mother’s hair, listening to hundreds of stories meant to both frighten and inspire told by this aunt or that great uncle or her dearest grandfather. This was where she met the love of her life, where she hid the letters and favors they’d exchanged. This was the place that she’d told her brother that she was scared of their marriage and he’d promised not to touch her before she asked. Summerhall was everything good of her house, a visual representation of the resplendent love and beauty a Targaryen could hold.

And now Rhaella watched it burn.

Gods only know how long it took, to reach the woods. Gyldan only laid her down when they were at the edge, a few meters away from the road and just a dash away from the outer lake.

Later, Rhaella wouldn’t be able to recall much of the actual birth. The fire and the night that preluded it would be seared into her memory forever, every joyful laugh and smile turned into an agonizing scar in her recollection. But the process of bringing her first babe into the world was lost into a fog of pain and deliria, peppered with the occasional demand in Maester Gyldan’s voice that she push or breathe. Rhaella could never remember how long it took, hours or minutes or however long the birth truly lasted. It was all a blur. But she what would remember was the salt of her own tears stinging on cracked lips, the taste of smoke scratching down her throat, and the feeling of a tiny, soft baby being laid in her arms.

Her fingers shook as Rhaella swept them over her child’s eyes, clearing them of the blood and mucus that clung to his skin like some sort of flimsy armor. His skin, covered as it was with gore, seemed to shine with an innocence too beautiful to understand. He was so small, this little babe, and she felt a sudden burst of fear wrap its fingers around her throat and squeeze.

Tiny and delicate and fragile and breakable. This child was just a mass of too-soft skin and thin bones and a heavy head that drooped if she didn’t hold it. He was completely defenseless; anyone with a spot of blackness in their heart could snatch him up and snap his little body in two. It would so easy, to lose this child. One instance there and the next, gone.

Why had she ever thought she could do this? Have a child? Rhaella wasn’t ever known for being strong, physically or otherwise. How could she have ever been willing to expose her heart to such vulnerability, to leave it in the frail hands of a baby and blindly hope that it wouldn’t be torn to shreds when, inevitably, something happened to her child? How did she ever think he would be safe in a world of such danger? Rhaella knew, deep, deep, in her gut, that her baby was going to suffer and it was her fault. She brought him into the world admisdt a tragedy too terrible to comprehend, to uphold the Targaryen legacy of madness and she knew he was going to suffer because of it. Just like she knew that if he ever died, her heart would die with him. What misery had she given him, to force him to bear witness to the funeral pyre of their family-

But then, his eyes were open and she saw her own tearstained face reflected in a perfect indigo gaze. Then suddenly the fear didn’t matter.

A fierceness Rhaella had never known roared through her, sweeping through her limbs and chasing the phantom caress of terror from her. It settled in her chest, warm and heady, pulsing in time with her heart. It made her feel strong and furious, like whoever dared threaten her little dragon babe would be ripped apart with a rage never seen before. She would lay down her life for the child in her arms, without a thought spared. She would be the knight to protect him. She would be his Ser Duncan-chase away bad dreams and demons alike, for as long as he needed. For him. For her son. For her Rhaegar.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it! Drop some feedback, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy!
> 
> \--Rae


End file.
